Forums

Players Plus-Minus ratings Topic

I have to believe that WIS has the data to calculate a players Plus-Minus. I think this would be super useful and fun for coaches. We all suspect that a defensive stopper with a light offensive game (a la Shane Battier) has an impact on games, but it would be great to see this quantitatively.

Alternatively they could capture the PER but I like the Plus-Minus better.

It'd be interesting to see, but I almost think it's too useful. By that I mean, it would make it incredibly easy for less experienced coaches to determine who the best players were.

It would also make it incredibly easy for anyone to look at the players with great plus/minus ratings and find the common thread as far as ratings go. Right now there are some great ideas on important ratings, but it would refine that so much I think the game would become far more "cookie-cutter" than it already is.

do the coaches who take the time to mine data compute the +/- themselves, and find it as useful as bistiza suggests?

in general, id be all for making it easier for new coaches to get up to speed on what makes players good. i think the abstract, what is a good player, should be fairly clear, but the complexity should really come in when you are trying to decide what players to put together to build a team. i think its kind of silly how little info the new coaches are given on this stuff.

I did +/-, last season. though I feel Opp FG% would be a more telling stat.I tried to do that as well. but with constant subs and players sometimes coming in out of position, not to mention defensive break downs,switches and help side defensive make it impossible for us to accurately measure Opp FG%. I stopped the +/- date collection right before conference play. It just takes too long to jot down all the data. I wanted to know what carried more weight. my best defender who was one of my worst scorers, or my 2nd best scorer who was my 2nd worst defender. The best Defender carried a modest +/- , the no D all offensive player had very good +/-. I couldn't tell you if it's because he gave up 2 and scored 3 or if it was because my strong starting core around him. while the best defender came off the bench and played with other differently skilled players. YES it would be very nice and useful if WiS would give us some metric stats. Per/32's and advanced stat logs I keep take time. and the whole HD community would find these tools great if avail.

+/- seems like a good stat to offer-- it'll tell us something, but there will be a ton of noise in it and we'll wind up only knowing a small portion of the picture (especially in a small sample size like the college season). still, it'd be fun to take a look at.

Agreed, ae and girt. It would be stat candy, for the most part. However! I'm in favor of lots of stat candy and if it's easily calculable I don't see why it shouldn't be available. There's a lot of easy numberfluff that could be posted. Is there really a downside? I ask that knowing that any particular statistic can be misleading - some more than others, sure, but I don't buy that as a reason to keep information unavailable.

Other perspective: There's plenty of motivation for WIS to do it. You always want your site to be stickier.